Posted: Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2014

From Dan Cadman, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies:

As it does from time to time, Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse has produced a bland-sounding statistical analysis by the name “Immigration Court Cases Closed Based on Prosecutorial Discretion, by Immigration Court and Hearing Location as of November 30, 2013” which should raise the eyebrows of North Carolinians who have even the tiniest bit of interest in seeing the nation’s immigration laws enforced.

The analysis provides a statistical breakdown of backlogs at 83 immigration court locations throughout the country (including North Carolina’s immigration court, which is based in Charlotte), as well as the number of cases closed through the use of prosecutorial discretion.

“Prosecutorial discretion” is a euphemism for the Obama administration’s practice of having its trial attorneys ask immigration judges to dismiss charges against illegal aliens facing deportation.

The dismissal requests do not stem from the discovery that the aliens are living in the United States legally and with permission. The government simply does not choose to pursue the charges, preferring to release these aliens because they don’t fit the administration’s philosophical views about immigration enforcement – even though federal officers have already expended hundreds of hours in investigating, arresting and charging these aliens with violating the immigration laws.

TRAC’s analysis shows that of the 344,230 cases backlogged nationwide, 27,876 (8.1 percent of the total) have been closed through the use of prosecutorial discretion. That seems innocuous enough, doesn’t it?

But if you examine the data more closely, you see that in 28 of the 83 immigration courts listed (more than a third of all the courts) the prosecutorial discretion closures were in the double digits.

Some of those double-digits are quite shocking: 38 percent of the cases in Charlotte got flushed.

Other locations fared badly as well: 35.5 percent of the backlogged cases were closed at the immigration court in San Diego, which sits just north of our border with Mexico. What must intended border crossers queuing up in Tijuana derive from that message of largesse heard from their just-released compatriots?

The analysis also reflects that the locations in which prosecutorial discretion was exercised included a variety of detention centers, jails and prisons. If the government either considered the aliens to pose sufficiently serious threats to require being placed into lockdown, or the aliens were facing criminal charges in addition to being illegally in the country, what kinds of cases possibly merited this extraordinary form of extra-judicial “relief”?

If you think these acts of prosecutorial discretion are being handled foolishly, as I do, you will recognize that they put the lie to the government’s overblown claims of the past few years about the record numbers of aliens removed. Those records have been achieved by numerical manipulation, and shifty redefinitions that pretty much amount to cooking the books.

Now, ask yourself, is this an administration that you should trust to handle, with any sense of wisdom or integrity, a broad-based amnesty involving millions of aliens?

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/201...l#.UtdY6LQtodw